Indian media groups have told the Supreme Court that the government’s privacy law, which would require journalists to seek consent from people they write about, amounts to pre-censorship and could force newsrooms to shut down.
The hearing on Tuesday marked the start of the most high-profile legal challenge to the legislation.
The lawsuit comes amid accusations of declining press freedom in India since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014. Critics say many mainstream media outlets have failed to adequately scrutinise his government, which denies the allegations and says it respects press freedom.
A group of 21 news publishers, including companies owned by billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, has challenged the law, arguing that it would undermine investigative journalism and allow the government to identify journalists’ sources, Reuters reported on Monday.
“It is changing the whole concept of what is news,” Madhavi Goradia Divan, a lawyer representing the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), told the judges.
“Newsrooms will shut down, if we have to ask for permission...it's then a complete regime of pre-censorship.”
The case is the most high-profile challenge to Modi’s privacy law so far. Previous legal challenges had been brought only by free speech activists and a group of smaller news outlets.
The Supreme Court scheduled the next hearing for next month.
Media companies received assurances at an August meeting with the government that the law would protect press freedom. However, the absence of a written exemption for journalists, unlike provisions in the European Union, Singapore and Britain, has raised alarm, the publishers said in a filing earlier this month.
The publishers are seeking to have most of the law’s contentious provisions, due to take effect from May 2027, struck down. They argue that the legislation could force publishers to delete stories and empower the government to demand information that could expose reporters’ sources.
The DNPA, which is leading the legal challenge, counts Ambani’s Network18, Adani’s NDTV and other major media groups, including the Indian Express and Times Internet, part of the Times of India group, which publishes India’s largest-selling English-language daily, among its members.
Divan told the court that earlier versions of the law explicitly exempted journalists, but the final legislation did not.